Banquets of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers

Cover of first edition, 1984
Author	Isaac Asimov
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Black Widowers
Genre	Mystery short stories
Publisher	Doubleday, Fawcett Crest
Publication date	1984
Media type	Print (Hardcover), (Paperback)
Pages	212 pp
ISBN
OCLC	10403672
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Class	PS3551.S5 B3 1984
Preceded by	Casebook of the Black Widowers
Followed by	Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers is a collection of mystery short stories by science fiction author Isaac Asimov featuring his fictional club of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in September 1984, and in paperback by the Fawcett Crest imprint of Ballantine Books in June 1986. The first British edition was issued by Grafton in August 1986.

This book is the fourth of six that describe mysteries solved by the Black Widowers, based on a literary dining club he belonged to known as the Trap Door Spiders. It collects twelve stories by Asimov, together with a general introduction and an afterword by the author following each story. Nine of the stories were previously published; "The Driver," "The Wrong House" and "The Intrusion" are new to this collection.

Each story involves the club members' knowledge of trivia. Nearly every story here is about decoding a riddle, each of which provides a clue based on dying or last words, misunderstood words, forgotten words, or withheld words. A few are based on facts that are, perhaps, not generally known to the public – Asimov was a frequent writer of popular science and his inclination to explain anything and everything for the general public carried over into other fields, such as history and sociology – but all the mysteries play fair with the reader, who is given either enough information to figure out the solution or a satisfying conclusion that is based on previously given facts and personality qualities.